Niklas Zennström, Skype's cofounder, is backing a company building car-sized aircraft in Germany, called Lilium Aviation.

The two-year-old Munich startup received €10 million on Monday from Zennström’s venture capital firm Atomico and other investors to help it develop the personal electric planes that are capable of vertical take-off and landing (VTOL).

"This is a really good example of founders who are using deep technology to take on a very big problem," said Zennström, who has joined the board of the company, at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference.

"The way we deal with transportation today is broken. There are congestions and to get from East London to West London takes forever. There is pollution in our cities with carbon dioxide so we get climate change.

"Of course you have electrical vehicles and autonomous vehicles to deal with some of those things but really to solve it in a big way we think you need to take to the skies."